What is Anti-Racism? And Why it Means Anti-Capitalism: Book event featuring Arun Kundnani
WHERE:
20 Cooper Square 4th floor
New York NY, USA
WHEN: Tuesday, December 12, 6:00pm — 8:00pm
What is Anti-Racism? And Why it Means Anti-Capitalism: Book event featuring Arun Kundnani
IN CONVERSATION WITH PROFESSOR TEJASVINAGARAJA, PROFESSOR PAULA CHAKRAVARTTY, AND MODERATED BY PROFESSOR NIKHIL SINGH
About the Book:
This scintillating intellectual and political history provides a new understanding of racism, and a better way to fight it. Liberals have been arguing for nearly a century that racism is fundamentally an individual problem of extremist beliefs. Meanwhile, anticolonial revolutionaries traced racism to the broad economic and political structures of modernity. This deeply researched and swift-moving narrative history tells the story of the two antiracisms and their fates. As neoliberalism reordered the world in the last decades of the twentieth century, the case became clear: fighting racism means striking at its capitalist roots.
Arun Kundnani is a writer based in Philadelphia. His previous books include The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror (Verso, 2014). Kundnani has written for
the Nation, the Guardian, the Washington Post, Vice, and The Intercept. He is a former editor of the journal Race & Class and was a scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. He is active with the Imam Jamil Action Network.
Paula Chakravartty is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the NYU Gallatin School and the Department of Media, Culture and Communication and the Co-Director of the Critical Racial Anti-Colonial Study Co-Lab.
Tejasvi Nagaraja is assistant professor of history at Cornell University in the ILR School.
Dismantling Racial Capitalism creates space to develop and sharpen our understanding of racial capitalism, how it functions, its horrific consequences, and, most importantly, how we can challenge and dismantle it. The convening will bring together academics, organizers, policy-makers, students and change-makers for a deeply-rooted examination of how racial capitalism drives inequality, exploitation, and destruction, and how we can catalyze change.
For more information on the program, speakers and sponsors visit the DRC webpage here.
New York University and Gallatin provide reasonable accommodations to people living with disabilities who wish to attend events at the School. For every event, Gallatin staff will be on hand to assist guests. Please note that the entrance at 715 Broadway is wheelchair accessible. To request accommodations, such as a sign language interpreter, assistive listening devices, or large print programs, or should you have questions regarding accessibility for an event, please contact Gallatin’s Office of Special Events by emailing events.gallatin@nyu.edu or by calling 212-992-6328. Should you need an accommodation, we ask that you send your request as early as possible so that we have time to fulfill your request.
Violence of Democracy: A Book Talk with Author Ruchi Chaturvedi
WHERE:
20 Cooper Square 5th floor
New York NY, USA
WHEN: Tuesday, September 19, 6:00pm — 7:30pm
The NYU Center for Humanities is excited to welcome Professor Chaturvedi (Senior Lecturer, Department of Sociology, University of Capetown) to discuss her new book Violence of Democracy: Inter-Party Conflict in South India in conversation with Gianpaolo Baiocchi (Professor and Director, of Urban Democracy Lab, Gallatin). Moderated by Paula Chakravartty (James Weldon Johnson Professor of Media Studies, Associate Professor, Gallatin and MCC)
About the book
In Violence of Democracy Ruchi Chaturvedi tracks the rise of India’s divisive politics through close examination of decades-long confrontations in Kerala between members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and supporters of the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and extensive archival research, Chaturvedi investigates the unique character of the conflict between the party left and the Hindu right. This conflict, she shows, defies explanations centering religious, caste, or ideological differences. It offers instead new ways of understanding how quotidian political competition can produce antagonistic majoritarian communities. Rival political parties mobilize practices of disbursing care and aggressive masculinity in their struggle for electoral and popular power, a process intensified by a criminal justice system that reproduces rather than mitigating violence. Chaturvedi traces these dynamics from the late colonial period to the early 2000s, illuminating the broader relationships between democratic life, divisiveness, and majoritarianism.
New York University and Gallatin provide reasonable accommodations to people living with disabilities who wish to attend events at the School. For every event, Gallatin staff will be on hand to assist guests. Please note that the entrance at 715 Broadway is wheelchair accessible. To request accommodations, such as a sign language interpreter, assistive listening devices, or large print programs, or should you have questions regarding accessibility for an event, please contact Gallatin’s Office of Special Events by emailing events.gallatin@nyu.edu or by calling 212-992-6328. Should you need an accommodation, we ask that you send your request as early as possible so that we have time to fulfill your request.
Resource Radicals: A Book Talk with Author Thea Riofrancos
WHEN: Thursday, March 25, 5:30pm — 7:00pm
In 2007, the left came to power in Ecuador. In the years that followed, the “twenty-first-century socialist” government and a coalition of grassroots activists came to blows over the extraction of natural resources. Each side declared the other a perversion of leftism and the principles of socioeconomic equality, popular empowerment, and anti-imperialism. In her book Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Duke University Press, 2020), Thea Riofrancos unpacks the conflict between these two leftisms: on the one hand, the administration’s resource nationalism and focus on economic development; and on the other, the anti-extractivism of grassroots activists who condemned the government’s disregard for nature and indigenous communities. Hear from the author in conversation with Alejandro Velsaco about Ecuador’s commodity-dependent economy and history of indigenous uprisings offer a unique opportunity to understand development, democracy, and the ecological foundations of global capitalism.
New York University and Gallatin provide accommodations to people living with disabilities who wish to attend events at the School, whether in person or virtually. To request accommodations or should you have questions regarding accessibility for an event, please contact Gallatin’s Office of Special Events by emailing gallatinevents@nyu.edu.
BOOK TALK: Contested City: Art and Public History as Mediation at New York’s Seward Park Urban Renewal Area
WHERE:
20 Cooper Square
New York NY, USA
WHEN: Wednesday, March 13, 1:00pm — 2:30pm
The Urban Democracy Lab invites you to support our friend and colleague Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani and celebrate the publication of her book, Contested City: Art and Public History as Mediation at New York’s Seward Park Urban Renewal Area on Wednesday, March 13 at 12:30pm in 20 Cooper Square Room 222. For those of you who know Gabrielle and are familiar with the struggles over space and place at the “SPURA” (now Essex Crossing) the book feels like an urgent reminder of how important the preservation of people—their livelihoods, their stories, and their quality of life—is to the health of our city’s neighborhoods. You can find out more about the book here.
We have limited space for this event and will be distributing a limited number of copies of the book to those who participate in our working groups. Please RSVP directly to urbandemos@nyu.edu to reserve a seat.
New York University and Gallatin provide reasonable accommodations to people living with disabilities who wish to attend events at the School. For every event, Gallatin staff will be on hand to assist guests. Please note that the entrance at 715 Broadway is wheelchair accessible. To request accommodations, such as a sign language interpreter, assistive listening devices, or large print programs, or should you have questions regarding accessibility for an event, please contact Gallatin’s Office of Special Events by emailing events.gallatin@nyu.edu or by calling 212-992-6328. Should you need an accommodation, we ask that you send your request as early as possible so that we have time to fulfill your request.
The Mask and the Flag, Book Talk with Paolo Gerbaudo
WHEN: Monday, June 5, 6:00pm — 8:00pm
The Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU invites you to join them for the book launch of The Mask and the Flag: Populism, Citizenism, and Global Protest by Paolo Gerbaudo. The author will be present in a conversation with Michael Gould-Wartofsky and Marina Sitrin, moderated by Stephen Duncombe.
From the Arab Spring to the Spanish Indignados, from Occupy Wall Street in New York to Nuit Debout in Paris, contemporary protest bears the mark of citizenism, a libertarian and participatory brand of populism which appeals to ordinary citizens outraged at the arrogance of political and financial elites in the wake of the Great Recession. The Mask and the Flag draws from 140 interviews with activists and live witnesses of occupations and demonstrations to explore the new politics nurtured by the movement of the squares of 2011-16 and its reflection of an exceptional phase of crisis and social transformation. Gerbaudo demonstrates how in waging a unifying struggle against a perceived Oligarchy, today’s movements combine the neo-anarchist ethos of horizontality and leaderlessness, inherited from the anti-globalisation movement, and a resurgent populist demand for full popular sovereignty and the reclamation of citizenship rights. The volume analyses the manifestation of this ideology through the signature tactics of these upheavals, including protest camps in public squares, popular assemblies and social media activism. Furthermore it charts its political ramifications from Podemos in Spain to Bernie Sanders in the US, revealing how the public square occupations have been foundational to current movements for radical democracy worldwide.
Paulo Gerbaudo is a political sociologist and Director of the Centre for Digital Culture at King’s College London. He is also a board member of the research committee on social classes and social movements of the International Sociological Association. He writes for The Guardian and OpenDemocracy.
Michael Gould-Wartofsky is a writer and photographer and a doctoral candidate in sociology at New York University. He is the author of The Occupiers: The Making of the 99 Percent Movement, and his writing has been published in the Washington Post, The Nation, In These Times, Jacobin, Gizmodo, and other venues.
Marina Sitrin is a writer, lawyer, and organizer whose work focuses on social movements and justice around the world. She is co-author of They Can’t Represent Us!: Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy and author of Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina and Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina. She holds a JD in International Womens’ Human Rights from CUNY Law School and a PhD in Global Sociology from Stony Brook University.
Stephen Duncombe is a Professor of Media, Culture and Communications of New York University where he teaches the history and politics of media. He is the author of several books, including Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy and Notes From Underground: Zines and the Politics of Underground Culture. Duncombe, a life-long political activist, co-founded the School for Creative Activism in 2011, and is presently co-director of the Center for Artistic Activism.
When Louis XVI presented Benjamin Franklin with a snuff box encrusted with diamonds and inset with the King’s portrait, the gift troubled Americans: it threatened to “corrupt” Franklin by clouding his judgment or altering his attitude toward the French in subtle psychological ways. This broad understanding of political corruption—rooted in ideals of civic virtue—was a driving force at the Constitutional Convention.
For two centuries the framers’ ideas about corruption flourished in the courts, even in the absence of clear rules governing voters, civil officers, and elected officials. Should a law that was passed by a state legislature be overturned because half of its members were bribed? What kinds of lobbying activity were corrupt, and what kinds were legal? When does an implicit promise count as bribery? In the 1970s the U.S. Supreme Court began to narrow the definition of corruption, and the meaning has since changed dramatically. No case makes that clearer than Citizens United.
In 2010, one of the most consequential Court decisions in American political history gave wealthy corporations the right to spend unlimited money to influence elections. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion treated corruption as nothing more than explicit bribery, a narrow conception later echoed by Chief Justice Roberts in deciding McCutcheon v. FEC in 2014. With unlimited spending transforming American politics for the worse, warns Teachout, Citizens United and McCutcheon were not just bad law but bad history. If the American experiment in self-government is to have a future, then we must revive the traditional meaning of corruption and embrace an old ideal.
Zephyr Teachoutis an organizer, educator, and scholar with years of experience as a leader in the fights for economic and political equality and against concentration of wealth and control in the hands of the few. Currently an Associate Professor of Law at Fordham Law School, Teachout was previously a Visiting Professor of Law at Duke University and a lecturer at the University of Vermont. She has worked as an antitrust and media expert who served as the Director of Internet Organizing for the 2004 Howard Dean presidential campaign. In 2008 she cofounded A New Way Forward, an organization built to break up the power of big banks, and was involved with Occupy Wall Street. In 2014, she ran for the Democratic Party nomination for Governor of New York and remains actively involved with local politics.
Mansur Gidfar is the Communications Director of Represent.Us, a non-partisan national campaign to combat the undue influence of special interests in American government. Mansur has previously worked as a deputy editor and contributor for viral media site Upworthy, one of the fastest-growing media companies of all time.
Thomas Frank is a political analyst, historian, and columnist for Salon.com. He is the author of a number of books, including What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004), The Wrecking Crew (2010), andPity the Billionaire (2011).
Making Democracy Fun:How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics (MIT Press, 2014) brought together author and Executive Director of the Participatory Budgeting Project Josh Lerner with scholars and community organizers to discuss the ways gaming mechanisms, like competition, clear rules, and measurable progress, can enhance democratic involvement.
